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Nothing With God Is Wasted: Calling, Career Changes and the Summers You Have Left

From the show · October 22, 2026 · Andrew Rocha

About 15 years ago, I showed up for my first night of young adults at Bower Ponds, the park in downtown Red Deer. The pastor running it was Steven Schwartz. He was paying attention to guys like me.

"I always had my eye out for, you know, young men searching, trying to figure things out," he told me when I had him on the show.

That was me. Steven became one of the most influential people in my young adult years, and I told him so. When I sit down to teach the Bible to my own kids now, a lot of how I do it goes back to him.

Today Steven is the artistic director for The Chosen, the series about the life of Jesus. He travels for work, works from home the rest of the time, and he and his wife, Stephanie, homeschool their kids. Some days, he admitted, feel monotonous. That's not what you'd expect from a guy whose work has ended up in Times Square.

His path from that rented room at Bower Ponds to The Chosen was anything but a straight line. That's what I wanted to talk about.

A punk band and a kid who wasn't built for calculus

I asked Steven how he knew he was called to ministry. He said he had a mystical answer and a practical one, and the practical one was refreshingly honest.

At 12, he daydreamed about preaching sermons. His maternal grandfather was a Pentecostal church planter with "50 plus years in ministry," and Steven looked up to him and to his own pastor. He also struggled in school. Calculus and trigonometry did nothing for him. In high school he started a punk rock band with his friends, and they sang songs about Jesus.

"I just wasn't like cut out to do other things," he said.

I think there's real wisdom in that. Steven's sense of calling came from noticing two things at once: what he kept daydreaming about, and what he plainly wasn't built for. He was honest about both.

When he started studying Scripture seriously, reading it in context as one big story, he landed on a rule he still uses: "If it's not life-giving to you first, it's not gonna be life-giving to anyone else."

He meant preaching, but I think it applies to anything you try to teach, including what you teach your kids about money. It's hard to hand someone a thing you aren't living yourself.

The itch to blow it all up

In 2011 Steven pioneered a campus ministry at what was then Red Deer College (it became Red Deer Polytechnic in 2021). He wanted to build something nobody had done yet. Later he led the young adults ministry I walked into.

He's self-aware about how he's wired. He described a five-year or seven-year itch, and then said it plainly: "I like to build something, I like to blow my life up, I like to do something that's scary and risky." Once a thing settles into maintenance, he starts getting restless.

He's also patient about results. "You can't see it for 10 or 15 or 20 years," he said about ministry. He can now point to eight or ten people from those young adult years who are married, have kids of their own, and are still serving in their churches. He was quick to say that was their doing, not his.

Then, heading into 2016, he sensed the 2015 to 2016 school year would be the last one for the young adults ministry, which by then was called The Collective. Around the same time, a creative and production role opened up at his church.

"I was inexperienced, to say the least, when it comes to production," he told me.

He took it anyway. He didn't know the gear, but he had taste, and he believed he could lead the department well.

How do you know when to jump?

This is the part of the conversation I'd send to anyone sitting on a big decision.

Steven doesn't have a five-step plan. He said discernment looks different for everyone, and the path is never linear. But he does have a few anchors.

The first is counsel. "The scriptures say that there's wisdom in a multitude of counsel," he said. He's thinking of Proverbs 15:22: "Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established." He looks for mentors who can see potential in what he called "seed form," before it's obvious to anyone else.

The second is one you might not expect from a pastor. "There's also an element of betting on yourself," he said. If he believes God is calling him somewhere, he trusts that the calling includes figuring out the how. He told me that's worked out for him three times. And if he doesn't sense God's voice in it, he won't move.

He also repeated an idea he'd picked up about leadership: "Leadership is just a series of uncomfortable conversations or uncomfortable decisions." With experience, he's learned to read fear differently. If he's had wise counsel and he believes the calling is real, the fear is normal, and it doesn't mean he's wrong.

And my guess is you've felt that, sitting on a job offer or a business idea and waiting for the fear to go away first.

Saturdays are your inventory

During all of this, Steven and Stephanie were running a wedding photography business on the side. Stephanie found her niche in weddings, and instead of paying a second shooter, they shot together. From about 2015 through COVID they photographed more than 100 weddings across central Alberta, Calgary, Edmonton, Banff and Canmore.

"You do what you gotta do to make ends meet," he said.

He didn't romanticize it. "Saturdays are your inventory," he told me. Every wedding is a Saturday you can't sell twice, and a cancellation is a Saturday you can't get back. "COVID was a disaster." As the work at church grew, it became unsustainable to be shooting on Saturdays, serving at church on Sundays, and traveling midweek.

Then came a reminder: "Hey, you only have 10 summers left with, you know, your child."

That was about their oldest. Summers were their busiest wedding months, so every summer they said yes to a couple's big day was a summer they weren't fully with their own kids. He also noticed you don't see many wedding photographers still doing it in their fifties.

I repeated it back to him on the mic. Ten summers.

Sacred rhythms

For a few years, the way they made it up to the kids was what Steven called a "guilt vacation." Every October or November, after the busy fall of editing and family sessions, they'd take the kids to Disneyland.

Once they scaled the business back, they built something steadier. "Family night is Friday and we're gonna order a pizza, we're gonna watch a movie," he said. Board games too. It's simple, and it's protected.

"They begin to anticipate it," he said. "I think it gives them a sense of safety and confidence."

I told him I loved that he calls these things sacred. A Friday pizza night doesn't look like much from the outside. To a kid who knows it's coming every week, it says something about where they rank.

Leaving today at the gate

You can't have a podcast called The Currency of Happiness without talking about Disney, and Steven is the biggest Disney fan I know. "It's become a home away from home to a degree," he said.

He walked me through the entrance at Disneyland: you pick the left or right path past the train station and go through a tunnel, where a plaque tells you that here you leave today and enter another world. There's a reason you can't see the city from inside. The park is ringed by a 20-foot, tree-lined berm built to hide the real world, and Walt Disney personally changed one word on the plaque's draft, "where" to "here."

But Steven doesn't think Disneyland is happiness. "I think to a degree Disneyland is a counterfeit of what, you know, true happiness or true joy should be," he said.

He does think it's "a metaphor for life." For a few days, you let yourself be present without trying to fix every problem waiting for you outside the berm. And I'd guess you could use some practice at that too.

A thin line between grief and joy

This is where the conversation got personal for me.

My older brother passed away, and I shared on the show something my son said afterward. He was four, and he told us he thought his uncle was standing with Jesus.

Steven didn't rush past it. "There's such a thin line between these two worlds," he said, meaning grief and joy. "You need to feel the pain in order to feel the joy."

He pointed to a scene from season four of The Chosen, in the episode "An Honest Grief", where Jesus and Andrew are mourning the death of John the Baptist. In the middle of that grief, they end up laughing, and Andrew feels guilty about it. Jesus tells him, "Some of the moments in which we laugh the hardest come around the time of a funeral."

The writer of Ecclesiastes put it a long time ago: "A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance." Sometimes those times land on the same day.

Nothing with God is wasted

The title of this episode comes from something Steven's boss at The Chosen heard from one of his own spiritual mentors: "Nothing with God is wasted."

When Steven looks back, he can see how the earlier work prepared him for this. What he does now is mostly the marketing side, "bringing it to the world," as he put it.

He's careful about the weight of it. He said the main responsibility for how Scripture is portrayed sits with creator Dallas Jenkins, and that scripts go through theological advisors, including a Messianic rabbi, a Catholic priest and a New Testament professor, before they're filmed. Steven sees his own job the way you'd see marketing an Oreo. "The Oreo is good, right? It doesn't need anything." His job is to not get in the way.

And he doesn't think The Chosen is the finish line. "I don't necessarily think that this is just like the arrival," he said. To him, it's preparation for whatever comes next.

That came up again when we talked about the crucifixion, the part of the story Steven had spent the past year working on for the show. The disciples, he said, "didn't know the end of the story." They were living in the worst weekend of their lives without the ending we know. A lot of suffering comes without a visible reason. Steven's faith is that there is one anyway, even when we can't see it yet.

Try this

Steven's 10-summers line is worth doing on paper.

  1. Write down the name of each person in your house and how many summers you likely have left before they move out or move on.
  2. Next to each one, write one thing that is quietly taking those summers. For Steven it was Saturdays.
  3. Pick one small, repeatable thing you could protect every week, the way his family protects Friday night.

You don't need to blow your life up to do it. A Friday pizza night counts.

If you want help putting the bigger picture on paper, the free goal-setting guide walks through the Six Fs: finances, family, friends, faith, fitness and freedom.

There's a lot I haven't covered here, including Steven's answer to the question I ask every guest, what does happiness look like to you?

So here's my question for you: how many summers do you have left with the people under your roof, and what's taking them?

Listen to the full episode of The Currency of Happiness wherever you get your podcasts. If this was useful, send it to someone who could use it.

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